"One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one's time." Henry James, in an article on John Singer Sargent

"The vers librists, the advanced composers and the Futurist painters are supposed to have conspired in a plot to blow up the temple of the Muses. . . . [we cannot] explain the new form satisfactorily on the democratic theory: that vers libre has become popular because anybody can write it, and Futurism prevalent because anybody can paint futurist paintings, that these things, in short, are the consequence of the neglect of discipline and taste which has come in with the lowering of standards in a democratic society . . . No: it is pretty safe to assume, when a certain form of art becomes popular, not only among the fools and imposters, but also among the genuine artists, that this form is one which satisfies peculiarly the need for expression of the time. And has been invented by the voice of the time as the proper accent to it." Edmund Wilson from The Anarchists of TasteWho First Broke the Rules of Harmony, in the Modern World?

"The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has, I believe, made current the phrase 'climate of opinion' to describe the intellectual atmosphere in which people in a given period live. . . . [I]deas are transmitted by a kind of osmosis, like those tricks of manner and even of voice that two people, if married, are said to catch from each other." Irwin Edman, Philosopher's Holiday

"[Herodotus recounts that] Darius once asked some Greeks what would induce them to devour the dead bodies of their parents, and when they answered in horror that nothing could make them do an act so atrocious, he had some men from India brought in whose custom it was to do this very thing. He asked [the men from India] how they could be persuaded to burn their dead instead of eating them. They cried out in abhorrence and begged him not to utter such abominable words. 'As Pindar says,' concludes Herodotus, 'custom is king.' Edith Hamilton, The Great Age of Greek Literature

"The insight and character of a man express themselves most clearly in his judgments. In what he rejects, and what he accepts, he confesses to what is alien to him and what he has need of; and so each year designates unconsciously its present spiritual state, the compass of its past life. . . Thus also it is with nations; their praise and censure must always be strictly consonant to their situation." -- Goethe, The Methods of French Criticism

"The present time is experimenting in negations-- an amusing sport if it is remembered that while it takes but a few minutes to cut down a tree it takes centuries for a tree to grow . . . for the most part men believe what they want to. . . . I see no impropriety, however, in suggesting the isolated reflection that with effervescing opinions, as with the not yet forgotten champagnes, the quickest way to let them get flat is to let them get exposed to the air."Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

"'Let everything be tried.' they say, 'and if it is a mistake, we will learn by experience.' This argument might have some value, if we were always the same generation upon earth; or if, as we know not to be the case, people ever learned much from the experience of their elders." --T.S. Eliot

"We worship not the Graces nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. . . . I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men." --Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"You may assume, with Hobbes and Bentham and Austin, that all law eminates from the sovereign, even when the first human beings to enunciate it are the judges, or you may think that law is the voice of the Zeitgeist, or what you like. It is all one to my present purpose. . . We do not realize how large a part of our law is open to reconsideration upon a slight change in the habit of the public mind. . . judgements of relative importance may vary in different times and places." --Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

"We are reminded by William James in a telling page of his lectures on Pragmatism that every one of us has in truth an underlying philosophy of life, even those of us to whom the names and notions of philosophy are unknown or anathema. There is in each of us a stream or tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals. All their lives, forces which they do not recognize and cannot name, have been tugging at them--inherited instincts, traditional beliefs, acquired convictions; and the resultant is an outlook on life, a conception of social needs, a sense in James's phrase of 'the total push and pressure of the cosmos,' which, when reasons are nicely balanced, must determine where choice shall fall." Benjamin Cardozo, On the Nature of the Judicial Process

"Though any age may give birth to the fairest talent, it is not given to all to be able to develop it to its perfect proportions. . . . Each one, even the greatest genius, suffers in some respects from the social and political conditions of his age, just as in other respects he benefits by them. Any talent, the development of which is not favored by time and circumstances, and must on that account work its way through a thousand obstacles, and get rid of a thousand errors, must always be at a disadvantage, when compared with a contemporary one that has the opportunity to cultivate itself with facility and act to the extent of its capacity without opposition." --Goethe, Ancient and Modern.

"A mediocre talent is always biased by its age and must be fed by the elements of the age." Conversations of Goethe

"If the mass of contemporary authors were really individualists, every one of them inspired Blakes, each with his separate vision, and if the mass of the contemporary public were really a [collection of] individuals there might be something to be said for [reading everything current]. But this is not, and never has been, and never will be. . . . [C]ontemporary authors are not individuals. . . . It is not that the world of separate individuals of the liberal democrat is undesirable; it is simply that this world does not exist. For the reader of contemporary literature is not like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of diverse and contradictory personalities; [instead] he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think that they have something individually to offer, but are really all working together in the same direction . . . Individualistic democracy has come to high tide; and it is more difficult today to be an individual than ever before." --T.S. Eliot

". . . it isn't always easy to turn your back on what the rest of the world construes to be with-it. A decade or so ago, for example, I discovered that I had ceased to read much contemporary fiction. Faster than you can say Italo Calvino, I had fallen two Malamuds, three Roths, a Bellow-and-a-half, four Mailers, and five or six Updikes behind. I had let John Irving pass me by. So too, Ann Beattie, Joan Didion, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Every book you read is a book you don't read, by my reckoning, and there were two many important non-contemporary books I had not read." --Aristides (psedonym of American Scholar editor Joseph Epstein), Nicely Out Of It.

"Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go hang himself because he belongs to a race of pigmies, and not be the biggest pigmy that he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made." Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"For will not our own age one day be an ancient one, and have as quaint a custom as the rest; not contrasted with the rest, therefore, but ranked with them in respect of quaintness? Does Homer interest us now because he wrote of what passed beyond his native Greece and two centuries before he was born, or because he wrote what passed in God's world and in the heart of man which is the same after thirty centuries? Let our poets look to this: is their feeling really finer, truer, and their vision deeper, than that of other men, they have nothing to fear, even from the humblest subject; is it not so, they have nothing to hope but an ephemeral favor, even from the highest." Thomas Carlyle, An Essay on Robert Burns.

''After the age of predators comes the age of small print. A lesser era, perhaps, but we can't choose our eras, can we?'' [The elder lawyer Ehninger in:] Louis Auchincloss, The Partners

"Now, however, that the humanities are cutting loose from the German Ph.D. strait jacket, they may enjoy some freedom. To find harmony, I have had to flee the stridencies, not the strenuousness, the insincerities and blatancies of much that passes for Americanism. The ways of life that I have been in harmony with in my own country are not the vaunted 'American way.'"--J. Frank Dobie, A Texan in England

"The notion of a common will has teased political philosophers from the outset. It gets its greatest expression in the Hegelian State which made its highest bid for dominance during the Great War and failed; the State, as an entity, an organism apart from those who compose it, a creature to whom they owe unquestioning allegiance, and which may dispose of them at its own inscrutable pleasure. . . .Just where that will resides, or how it is made manifest, is not too plain; like other deities, it is wise not to expose itself too freely. Is it for example to be found in a referendum? . . . you may say that the majority has expressed itself. You may be wrong; in any case your assurance is factitious; men often answer for reasons quite alien to the issue; they seldom have anything that can truly be called an opinion. Their leaders take sides as their interest direct, and they follow because they are used to following." Judge Learned Hand, Democracy: Its Presumptions and Realities.

"There are also no earnest messages in this book. Half the world's suffering is caused by earnest messages contained in grand theories bearing no relation to reality--Marxism and No-Fault Auto Insurance, to name two. Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college. I'm not sure this book contains any serious content. No matter how serious the events I've witnessed, I'm not sure being serious about them did anything to improve the fate of the people involved." P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays In Hell

"Bertolt Brecht wrote to his wife, Helene Weigel, about the importance of the 'third thing' that was always there between them--their shared attachment to the Cause--as a living part of their relationship. Nowadays that seems easy to mock, but in times when political beliefs can lead to death or imprisonment, they become very much part of the emotional as well as the intellectual fabric of a life." Markus Wolf, Man Without A Face--The Autobiography Of Communism's Greatest Spymaster

"Every world-organization hitherto has been wrecked ultimately upon its own dogmatism ... . While it has rested serene in the ruts made by its own prosperity, the world has marched by it unseen. We have a glorious body of tradition handed down to us from the past, which we owe it to transmit unimpaired to the future. But let us understand what is fundamental and eternal, and what is mere interpretation to make it of service to the past. Let us while we have it use it well to make it of service to the present."--Roscoe Pound, Masonic Addresses and Writings of Roscoe Pound.

"Ancient tragedy was based on inescapable necessity, which was only sharpened and accelerated by an opposing will . . . But all necessity is despotic, whether it belongs to the realm of Reason, like custom and civil law, or to nature, like the laws of Becoming, and Growing and Passing-away, of Life and Death. Before these we all tremble, without realizing that it is the good for the whole which is aimed at. The will, on the contrary, is free, appears free, and is advantageous to the individual. Thus the will is a flatterer, and takes possession of men as soon as they learn to recognize it. It is the god of the modern world. Dedicated to it, we are afraid of opposing doctrines, and here lies the crux of that eternal division which separates our thought from the ancients. Through the motive of Necessity, tragedy becomes mighty and strong; though the motive of Will, weak and feeble. [In Shakespeare] Will and Necessity struggle to maintain an equilibrium; both contend powerfully, yet always so that Will remains at a disadvantage." --Goethe, Shakespeare ad infinitum

". . .that muzzle which all men wore on their souls in the Elizabethan day, might not have intercepted Shakesper's full articulations. For I hold it a verity, that even Shakespeare was not a frank man to the uttermost. And indeed, who in this intolerant Univervise is, or can be?" Herman Melville to Evert A. Duyckinck, March 3 1849.

"There were no rules about what you could or could not speak-act; there were no civic ordinances, no cops, and none of the thousands of other checks that exist to prevent people from running amok in the real world. . . . But it was a newbie mistake to suppose that just because the rules were not written down, they didn't exist. . . . [C]omplete freedom of speech was granted to the individual poster only inasmuch as the poster was accountable to the thread--to the totality of all the posts, to the ineffable flow in which they occurred. . . . The thread was fragile, imperiled by the wilderness of antisocial behavior all around it, just as the seventeenth century colonies in New England were imperiled by the wilderness all around them. Just beyond this pleasant society of mind, where there was wisdom, sympathy, and useful information, there was a howling void of savage shitheads willing to take full advantage of the anonymity and freedom from ordinary responsibility that the on-line world offered. . . .The pressure to conform to the thread was strong. It was fed by the general desire to belong, to find a home on-line, as well as the desire to seem 'clued' to the others in the group." " John Seabrook, from Deeper--My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace

"By the time Voltaire had published to the world his opinions on religion and society, he had found that there was not a country in Europe where he could live without fear of persecution and he was obliged to take refuge near Germany at the juncture of four jurisdictions so that he could flee from one to another at a moment's notice. Yes; in the harsh suppression of free speech and the hatred of unorthodox views, the France of the eighteenth century was sometimes quite as violent as the America of today." --Edmund Wilson

"As to the history of the Revolution, my ideas may be peculiar, perhaps, singular. What do we mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington. . . .I agree with you 'it is difficult to say at what moment the Revolution began.' In my opinion it began as early as the first plantation of the country. Independence of church and parliament was a fixed principle of our predecessors in 1620 as it was of Sam Adams and Chris Gadsden in 1776." John Adams, letters to Thomas Jefferson

 "I am Communist enough to distrust the idea of an 'open forum', which usually means a forum in which a Roman citizen can appear and talk as much as he wants within the range of Roman opinion." F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to Max Perkins Feb 7, 1924.

"A wide-spread celebrity, an elevated position in life, are good things. But, for all my rank and celebrity, I am still obliged to be silent as to the opinions of others, that I may not give offense. This would be but poor sport, if by this means I had not the advantage of learning the thoughts of others without their being able to learn mine." --Goethe

"I cannot contemplate human affairs, without laughing or crying. I choose to laugh. When people talk of the freedom of writing speaking or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists: but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more." John Adams letter to Jefferson, July 15, 1817.

"This country, which has given to the world the example of physical liberty, owes to it that of moral emancipation also. For as yet, it is but nominal with us. The inquisition of public opinion overwhelms in practice the freedom asserted by the laws in theory." Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, Jan 22, 1821

"Let me ask you, very seriously my friend, Where are now in 1813, the perfection and perfectability of human nature? Where is now, the progress of the human mind?" John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson.

"As for the herd of newspapers and magazines, I do not chance to know an editor in the country who will deliberately print anything which he knows will ultimately and permanently reduce the number of his subscribers. They do not believe that it would be expedient. How then can they print truth?" --Thoreau, A Plea for Captain John Brown

"I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can ever do much to help it . . . . And what is this liberty. . . ? It is not the ruthless, unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession only of a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow . . . . What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women. . . ." --Judge Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty.

[Andrew Jackson Downing, architect: ] "'The true philosophy of living in America,; he concluded, 'is to be found in moderate desires, a moderate establishment, and moderate expenditures.'" David E. Shi, The Simple Life

"The other day my dream was pictured to my mind. It was evening. I was walking homeward on Pennsylvania Avenue near the Treasury, and as I looked beyond Sherman's Statue to the west the sky was aflame with scarlet and crimson from the setting sun. But, like the note of downfall in Wagner's opera, below the sky line there came from little globes the pallid discord of the electric lights. And I thought to myself the Götterdämerung will end, and from those globes clustered like evil eggs will come the new masters of the sky. It is like the time in which we live. But then I remembered the faith that I have partly expressed, faith in a universe not measured by our fears, a universe that has thought and more than thought inside it, and as I gazed, after the sunset and above the electric lights there shone the stars." Judge Learned Hand, quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

"The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property--on this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like an organist on the organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number." Herman Hesse, Da Glaperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game)